Rotten to the Core (12 page)

             
Billy was far from being an angel
himself
. He knew that if the police ever raided this warehouse or found about their little shipping arrangement, he would go down for years. Billy played with the big boys, ripping off the police and the government,
half of whom,
let’s face it,
he
knew were
doing
a lot of
dodgy shit themselves,
which made his activities
more than ok
ay.
I
f you don’t take it, no-one’s going to just hand it to you, right
, he would say.
But he would never take
from
his own, and selling drugs to kids was just the lowest as far as Billy was concerned. Not only was he going to fuck up Jay’s life, he was going to enjo
y every second of doing it.
 
 

Kate just could not get her head around Emma’s weird behaviour
;
she was shocked as she made her way
back from Emma’s to her own house.

Her visit to Emma’s on the way back from the hospital hadn’t quite turned out
as
she had wanted, so now she was walking home t
o sort out her options.
She wouldn’t be staying at home if Billy was there
.
N
ot if she was right and this was all down to him, she couldn’t, it would
condone
his behaviour. And now Emma had let her down too.

Emma had been in
an a
bsolute state. Her eyes
were sunken and dark, her skin grey and dull, and in
the five days since Kate had last seen her it
might as
well have been five months
,
by the state of her
,
she looked
as if
she ha
d
lost about a stone, her cheeks looked so gaunt and hollow.
             
“What the hell has happened?” Kate asked
,
looking around the flat as if searching for a clue when she had first arrived
.
             
Emma didn’t seem to want Kate to be there, she had seemed reluctant to let her in, and Kate could see why now.
The
curtains were drawn, making the
room dark
.
T
here were cups filled with
cigarette
butts, mouldy food on plate
s
on the floor, it was much worse than normal. The place stank. Her friend was sitting there, strewn over the armchair
,
her legs dangling over the arm
;
she didn’t even bother to look at Kate, just sat there trance
-
like
 
and inhal
ing
long drag
s
from her cigarette.
             
“What do you mean ‘
w
hat’s happened’
?
N
othing
’
s bloom
ing well happened,” Emma smirked.
She knew what Kate was getting at
,
but she couldn’t be arsed to go into it. It was her house and she could do what she wanted. She didn’t have to explain herself to anyone
,
as far as she was concerned. Kate was too boring for her own good
,
Emma thought
,
as she put her fag out on the side of a dinner plate on the table next to her
.
T
hen
,
picking
up
her fag packet, she immediately sparked up another.

Kate could see her friend was on something
.
S
he knew that some of Emma’s friends smoked a bit of weed now and again, but Emma had never done anything other than that as far a
s
she knew,
and
it
had been
a sociable thing when she had done it in the past.
Now,
Emma’s eyes were glassy
,
her pupils
dilated.
             
“Are you on something
,
Em
;
have you taken anything?”
T
he concern in
Kate’s
voice turn
ed
to anger. What the hell was Emma playing at
?
             
“
O
h, chill out
,
Kate
;
it’s just a bit of coke, nothing to get so het up about
.
”
 
H
er friend laughed at her
.
             
Kate was furious
;
since when did Emma start using coke, if she had seen her in a nightclub dabbling in
it
, she still wouldn’t have been happy about it
,
but it would have made more sense
.
Emma was easily influenced and would have tried whatever her mates were doing;
Kate woul
d have put it down to being a one off while she was out drinking and not thinking straight.
I
t was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Emma was sitting in her dirty flat alone and clearly she was off her face
.
             
“Emma
,
w
hat the hell is going on? Since when did you start doing co
ke
?”
             
Emma was bored of Kate
’
s tone
:
she may be her friend but she wasn’t her mother
,
and
Emma
in no way
had
to explain herself to her.
“Kate, I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not but I’m a fucking adult and I don’t need to explain myself to anyone, I’m having a shit day so I’ve done a bit of coke, no big deal
.
O
k
ay,
M
iss
G
oody
-T
wo
-S
hoes?”
             
Kate couldn’t believe it
:
w
hat had got into her
friend
? Emma hadn’t seemed herself at the beginning of the week when she had come around either,
she realised;
what was she doing
?
“Emma, I came to speak to you about Jay
.
” Kate
spoke quietly.

“Jay got attacked last night, he’s in hospital
.
” Kate fought back tears as she spoke, then she felt anger bubble inside her as her friend
had
no reaction to the news
.

             
Emma sat there quietly, tapping her foot whilst focusing on the picture frame on the window
ledge;
she wanted to ask how he was, what had happened, but she knew i
f
she spoke about him now she would give the game up. She knew that she had started to fall for Jay herself, and right now Kate didn’t feature in the bigger picture
.
S
he was sure Jay felt the same way about her, but giving the game away to Kate would fuck things up for them before they had even started.
She continued to stare ahead blankly
, and didn’t appear to react to the news.
             
“Don’t you give a shit
,
Emma? My boyfriend is lying in hospital as we speak.
He’s b
lack and blue, he could have been killed. Don’t you even
care?
”
             
Emma stared at Kate
. S
he was feeling higher than a kite, which was the only thing
allowing
her to keep herself together. She
ha
d only just snorted a couple of lines five minutes before Kate had knocked on her door. She had been looking forward to the feeling of complete oblivion that she was craving more and more as the days
passed
. She hadn’t realised how addictive th
e
stuff
she was taking
was, but she knew that when she wanted to she could give it up easily
:
it
was
only coke. Jay had given her a few lines the night he
had
stayed, and
they had had
the most amazing sex
.
Emma was hooked. She had always been good in bed, it was her thing, and she wanted so badly to be wanted, needed
in fact
, that she
would pretty much do anything
. Jay had been persuasive, told her a few lines would loosen her up, and even though she knew that she would do almost anything to please him regardless, she took it anyway. She had never felt such
a
high, and they had fucked all night. He had been nice enough to leave her a few bags when he left the next day,
 
but this was her last one and Kate was putting a real dampener on her high now
;
she wished her friend would just go.

Emma was staring a
t the floor once again, looking as if she
w
ere
in a trance
.
Kate knew she had to get out of there before she grabbed her friend and shook some sense into her.
She had taken one last look of disgust at the squalor Emma was living in
then
made her excuses and left. Not that she had needed to make any excuses
;
Emma
had
acted
as if
she couldn’t wait for her to leave
,
quickly show
ing
her the door and slamm
ing
it almost off its hinges behind her.
She could have really done with a friend today, she thought sadly
,
as she put the key in her own front door. For the first time ever
,
her friend wasn’t there for her.

Kate
breathed a huge sigh of relief as she looked around the lounge and kitchen once she was home, thank
God
Billy was still out. She
went
upstairs to her bedroom, picking up a large bag from the landing cupboard on her way.

Her bedroom was bright pink
, as it
had been since she was a little girl. Her mum had painted it after she had begged and pleaded to have a ‘princess’s bedroom’. Her room was the smallest of the three
in the house
, but neither she nor Billy could bring themselves to sleep in their mother
’
s room
after
her death
;
they had left it exactly as it
was, although
Kate had washed the bedding and made the bed neatly
,
as her mum would have
.
O
ften
,
she would go in there and sit on the edge of the bed
.
S
ometimes it almost felt like her mum was there, she felt closer to her.
The room
still
felt as though it
belonged to her mum
.
Kate
wasn’t ready to disrupt that, so she stayed put in
her pink bedroom
. It had always made her feel safe. Some mornings
,
she would wake up here and forget, and for a few minutes she would feel
that
nothing had changed, that her mum would be downstairs making tea and toast, grilling Billy at the breakfast table about whatever trouble he’d been in the night before. It only lasted a couple of minutes,
and
then it hit her
:
her mum was gone.

When it had happened, her mum
had been walking back from the market
. It was
her Friday morning ritual, Kate and Billy used to joke about it
;
they had stopped offering to go with her on the basis that she was so shameless with her haggling
,
they had both been embarrassed. She would go down there first thing every Friday morning and barter
with
all the stall holders for the best price
s
she could get
.
She a
lways c
ame
home with bags full to the brim of every bit of fruit and
veg
imaginable
,
and generous cuts of meat at probably half the going rate. She was well liked
,
being a regular, but due to having hardly a penny to her name, she would try to get the stall holders to give her the cheapest deals possible, sometimes verging on begging.